Early in his narrative Flaubert constructs a magnificent ball at La Vaubyessard, the estate of the Marquis d’Andervilliers and in that chapter I direct my family to the moment just after the quadrille and before the cotillion when the air in the ballroom grows so thick and heavy the Marquis orders a servant to climb…
If never was the question. Even then. That when feels closer now might embarrass me before this window, more mirror than I would like at this hour, bathos of years ghosting face, throat, my impatient turning off of the lamp. Now I’m small again, and the world outside mysterious, perfumed, & large. Were I not…
The mule went blind and we were destitute. By day, it kept knocking its skull into trees. We moved to the barn where the mule curled up to us in sleep, its tubular hooves kicking through a dream. It wore a head bandage. My grandfather took on the role of the poet. “Never throw your…
The Muses are giving a thousand poets, painters, dancers The back of their hands, and having flown, seat themselves On the hypnotically spinning stools of Hartley Farms Where they are mouthing the giant menu with tremendous glee: Raspberry swirl, chocolate marshmallow fudge, swiss mocha almond… And motioning for Marina and Sophia in their green-and-white aprons…
In between “host” and “glint” is ghost. A “hint” will hiss next to “guess.” For example also the virtue of frost is moisture And in icicles, glaciers or in a body’s cooling gestures the centuries pile up. Bone too, keeps a ballad interior. Lacuna if it could speak would be laconic. Winter seethes and wrecks us,…
Bill held the knife. I held the book. "Cut a slit from the deer’s breastbone to the anus, taking care not to puncture the bladder," I read. My fingers stiffened in the wind. Steam rose off the guts as they hit the driveway. The moon shone off the snow. He had me hold a hoof….
"Something’s happened," my father says. There’s been a construction accident. A demolition gone wrong on a lot cattycorner to his apartment in Brooklyn. The crew dug too deeply into the dirt cavity where a house once stood, and into the bordering foundations. The house next door has collapsed. There may have been three people inside….
after Gwendolyn Brooks I. 1981. When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on barstools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is…
I was nearing the middle of my life when I became a girl. Up until then I was a woman, work-possessed, abstracted, safe. I wore khaki corduroy trousers weathered down to the gauze weave and a puffy and rather grimy electric-turquoise coat, and I cut my black hair short and blow-dried it perkily aloft. I…
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